


Everything Changed

by MoreHuman



Series: Decisions, Decisions [3]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: But Mostly Queer Feelings, Canon Compliant, Canon Queer Relationship, Episode: s05e11 Meet the Parents, Established Relationship, Eventual Fluff, Light Angst, Lots of Queer Feelings, M/M, Missing Scene, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:15:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21794389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoreHuman/pseuds/MoreHuman
Summary: He’d woken up this morning thinking it was just another birthday, just another year older. He’d been looking forward to spending it like almost every other day since his last birthday—with David in the store, with David in the cafe, with David in his bed. With David in his life. All the celebration he needs.Or... Patrick spends two years not talking about his past, then tries to cram it all into one conversation.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: Decisions, Decisions [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1541620
Comments: 124
Kudos: 583





	Everything Changed

**Author's Note:**

> Another thematic companion piece in my “Decisions, Decisions” series that works as a standalone story.

It’s been an incredible night, but Patrick’s happy when his apartment door clicks shut and he knows it’s behind him.

He’d woken up this morning thinking it was just another birthday, just another year older. He’d been looking forward to spending it like almost every other day since his last birthday—with David in the store, with David in the cafe, with David in his bed. With David in his life. All the celebration he needs.

When David had insisted he take the day off from the store, he knew there was something special coming, and he started looking forward to that, too. Then the something special turned out to be his parents, and he forgot why looking forward had ever appealed to him. He lost the knack for it completely. He spent the hours before the party looking back instead. Back on the person his parents knew, the person he thought he’d been. On everything that’s happened since he first thought differently.

In the end, this day did celebrate him, but it also transformed him. For some reason, the image in Patrick’s head is of a jack-o’-lantern, scraped raw on the inside so it can be filled with warmth and light. Only now it’s late and the glow is fading, the wax burned low.

Patrick hasn’t moved from the door. His hand is still on the knob, his shoulder leaned against the wall. David’s moving around in the kitchen, his back turned, opening cupboards and fluffing the flowers he brought home earlier. He’s not doing anything, Patrick realizes, except giving him space to think, to process. He knows what this day has been. He’s still trying to make everything okay.

But Patrick has his own part to do still, before anything is okay. Not all of his time spent looking back today was for his parents’ benefit, so he’s already decided how he needs to begin.

“Do you remember when Rachel came to town?” he asks. 

David goes still at the sink and for a second Patrick thinks he’s miscalculated, tripped a wire. But when David turns around, his mouth is tucked into one corner of his face, twisted into that odd little smile that can mean a lot of things, all of them good. In this case, Patrick reads it to mean, _Do I remember the whole song and dance I ended up doing because Rachel came to town?_

It’s thrilling, knowing that their most painful memory as a couple is already this far along the upward trajectory of tragedy-plus-time towards comedy.

Eventually David will delight in making this a dinner party story. He’ll look at a casual acquaintance over his wine glass and ask, “Have I ever told you about the time Patrick’s wife crashed our anniversary party?” And Patrick will have to kick him under the table and say, “Okay, that’s not _quite_ what happened.” And they’ll take turns filling in the details, arguing over specifics, talking to this other person, whoever it is, but mostly talking to each other, saying, _This is all okay_. And it will be.

They’re not there yet, but Patrick can see it in their future. In that smile.

David’s face is beautiful when it’s asymmetrical, and he’ll have to tell him that sometime. It’s precisely the kind of compliment Patrick loves to give—one he means sincerely, feels deeply, but is impossible for David to preen over. He has other things to say right now, though, so he files it away for later. It’ll keep.

“You’ve never asked me what she and I talked about. After the barbecue.”

The odd little smile snuffs out. “It didn’t feel like my business to ask.”

“Since when has that ever stopped you asking?” Patrick’s aiming for lightness with this, trying to bring the smile back. He’s missed the mark, but not fatally. He recovers. “It should feel like your business. It is your business. Sorry, can we…?”

He gestures to the couch and they sit, Patrick closer to the bed and David closer to the kitchen, a reversal of where they were this afternoon.

“You don’t have to do this,” David says.

There was a time when this would have been code for _please don’t do this_ , a signal that Patrick should weigh the truth in his next words carefully to avoid tipping them over. But now David means just what he says—Patrick doesn’t have to do this; Patrick can choose. It’s the same thing he said earlier, with different words: _I could just be your business partner, for tonight._

By now, Patrick is used to being the person David Rose loves. He’ll never get used to being the person David Rose is patient with.

“I want to,” Patrick says honestly. Then, even more honestly, he says, “I want to try. I owe you an explanation for this barrier I’ve put up between you and my past. I was thinking about it all day today and I… I couldn’t stand it if you thought it was ever because I was ashamed, or not sure about you.”

David’s neck rolls out several slow nods, looking like a thousand words have stalled out in his throat. Only one makes it through. “Okay.”

“I can’t guarantee this will make sense, and some of it may sound a little…” Patrick shakes his head, cutting off his own preamble. He has too little energy left in him to waste on lengthy warnings. “Just remember that it has a happy ending, okay?”

***

Rachel was staying in room 2, so that’s where they went. Patrick counted as they crossed the threshold and there were five. Five walls between him and David in room 7. No, six walls. He’d forgotten the office between rooms 4 and 5. He counted again to be sure.

“That guy,” Rachel said from his peripheral vision. “He’s…?”

“David. He’s my boyfriend.”

The words came out before Patrick could wonder if they were still true. He vowed to keep on not wondering.

“So, you’re bi?”

It was the question he’d been avoiding asking himself for months. For more than four months. He’d almost convinced himself that the answer didn’t matter. Surely, all that mattered was that he was with David. That he wanted, all the time, to be with David, who was exquisite and ridiculous and so difficult about everything but so easy to be around. What else could possibly matter, compared to that?

Now that someone else had asked, though, he had to admit the answer he’d known all along.

“No.”

Rachel managed one brave nod before her face crumpled and her shoulders quaked and she sank down on the edge of the bed. In that quiet, devastating way of hers, she cried.

Patrick didn’t have to guess what she was thinking about, because he was thinking about it too. About the first time he’d kissed her in the seats of their empty, darkened school auditorium. About the trip they’d taken to Montreal for her 26th birthday, when he’d joined her in the hotel shower. About the night he’d given her a ring he never took back and a promise he did. Just like that, all the times they’d been happy together became all the times they thought they’d been happy together.

_I met you and everything changed,_ he’d just said to David and, oh. These moments had changed too. He hadn’t considered that his good memories were also part of everything.

_We have a lot to talk about,_ he’d just said to Rachel. But now he couldn’t think of a single thing left to say.

***

“So she just cried for a while, and then I left.”

Patrick runs his hand along the edge of the couch cushion, feeling for each individual thread in the seam. He and David had picked this model out together after three days of shopping online. They’d both hated each others’ first choice but had the same second choice, so that’s what Patrick ordered. David was so adorably proud of himself for the compromise that Patrick hadn’t had the heart to tell him that it was his apartment and his money, so technically he was the only one compromising. Baby steps.

“That must have been hard,” David says.

Patrick nods reflexively before turning it into a shake of his head. He hadn’t told that story for David’s sympathy. “It just… spooked me, you know? I’d thought of myself as Rachel’s person for so many years of my life, and then I said one word and suddenly I never had been. I hadn’t prepared for that.”

“Mmm.” David’s staying on his end of the couch, like he can tell that Patrick needs to stay untouched if he’s going to get through what he needs to say. The distance between them feels like closeness.

“Anyway, I dodged my parents’ calls for a month after that. Because if I said something to them that left me feeling like I’d never been their son…” Patrick takes a deep breath instead of finishing that sentence and lets it out on the realization that he doesn’t have to. He’ll never have to consider that particular _what if_ ever again. “So instead I said nothing. And I kept saying nothing. Which was worse. It was selfish. I can see that now.”

“Okay.” David’s fidgeting with his rings, clearly having trouble convincing his hands to keep to themselves. Patrick adores him. “You can call it that if you want, but I have very high standards for selfishness, and this doesn’t qualify.”

“I don’t just mean selfish toward you. There was a moment tonight when I realized that.”

David settles his hands. “Tell me.”

***

Patrick was leaned against the booth closest to the window, watching David and Stevie slow dance to Carly Rae Jepsen in the middle of the cafe, when his mom brought him another drink. He hadn’t even realized the one in his hand was empty.

“Thanks, mom.” He clinked glasses with her, looking straight into her eyes, as required by their shared family superstition. When he looked away, she followed his gaze.

“He’s quite handsome,” she said, just as David started lip syncing to the bridge. Stevie rolled her eyes so hard that her head lolled back.

“He’s gorgeous,” Patrick said. “But I have to be careful to only tell him every tenth time I think it, or he gets insufferable.”

David, already on his third glass of whatever was in this punch, was really getting into it now. He pushed Stevie away and she retreated gratefully from the radius of his emphatic dance-pointing. The saxophone wailed, and he looked ready to drop to his knees. He recoiled at the last second and scowled down at the linoleum instead, probably remembering that time he’d asked to borrow Twyla’s mop and found out she didn’t own one.

“Then again, I like him a little insufferable.”

David looked up at him then, like he’d somehow heard this over the music, but Patrick knew he hadn’t. They were just looking at each other and smiling, like they did a hundred times a day. But his mom was seeing it for the first time.

“Oh, _Patrick_.” She gripped his elbow so tightly that his drink spilled a bit, but he didn’t look down. He needed every second of this moment he could get—his mother’s hand on his arm while he locked eyes with the man he loved across the room.

He’d never felt more like her son in all his life.

***

The lopsided smile is back. (Would the compliment “beautifully lopsided face” annoy David more than “beautifully asymmetrical face”? He’ll figure it out.)

“So your mom has the hots for me, huh?” David says, looking very smug. “You better watch out, she’s my type.”

“Hockey moms in their sixties are your type?”

“Brewers are my type.”

Patrick can tell he’s blushing by the way David’s face lights up. It’s a very truthful mirror, his boyfriend’s face, now that he’s learned how to read it.

“I feel like I should warn you that my dad used to box in college.”

“Mmm. You’re forgetting that I’ve never met a sporty Brewer I couldn’t charm the pants off of.”

Patrick forces himself to swallow the reply on his tongue—something about how he really hopes the pants are metaphorical in this case. The banter is as easy, as distracting as the physical affection they’re still holding back from, and he hasn’t finished yet.

David must realize it, too, because he prompts, “You feel like you’ve been selfish toward your mom?”

Patrick nods and looks down at his hands. He wishes he had his own rings to fidget with. “Both my parents. I could have had them on this journey with me. They deserved that.”

“Okay, but it’s your journey?” There’s a fierceness in David’s voice that would be sweet if Patrick had earned it. “What about what you deserve?” 

“That’s the thing,” Patrick sighs. “That’s always been my problem. Staying too focused on what I deserve over everything else.” 

They’ve reached the part he’s afraid won’t make sense. He knows David, who’d grown up with a team of nannies and a stack of money where his parents should have been, will have trouble understanding the damage that a perfectly normal upbringing can do. 

“I was raised to believe I deserved a fulfilling life, and I think it blinded me to myself. No one ever told me that fulfillment is a feeling, not a set of circumstances. I always figured it was this puzzle I just had to solve. Find the right pieces, fit them together the right way, and then you’ve done it.”

“You love puzzles,” David says, and Patrick hadn’t given him enough credit. He knows nothing of normal upbringings, true, but he does know Patrick. He knows about the Sudoku book he keeps under the store counter for slow days, and the Rubik’s cube he can always solve in under two minutes, no matter how much David jumbles it.

“I’m good at them, too,” Patrick reminds him. “I built myself a nice life. Out of the pieces I could see.”

Growing up, every adult Patrick met had led some slight variation of the same life—job, (straight) marriage, house, kids, occasionally divorce followed by another (straight) marriage. The unhappy ones always seemed to have made some obvious mistake (drugs, maybe, or infidelity) that broke the formula. The happy ones always seemed more or less the same. Patrick had been pleased to discover that life worked off the same trick as math—just don’t make mistakes. He was good at not making mistakes. All his report cards said so.

“It was a nice life, and that’s what makes it so hard to think about now,” Patrick continues. “Maybe it seems like I avoid talking about it because I was sad back then, but I wasn’t. Not all the time. Mostly I was happy. I know I was happy; I made sure of it. And I want to remember being happy, but I can’t. Every time I try, I just start looking for all the lying and pretending I know is there but can’t always see. It’s exhausting.”

He’s exhausted now, he realizes. David must be tired, too. Before today even started, he’d already planned a whole surprise party, and that would have been enough. Why is he keeping them both awake for this? To whine about how his life started out happy and got infinitely happier, like that’s somehow a real problem?

Patrick rubs his face into his hands as if that might reset his thoughts. He hears David shifting and braces himself to be hugged or told to come to bed or both. But when he looks up, David’s pulled his shoes off and brought his feet up onto the cushions between them, arms folded over his knees. Patrick’s so glad he compromised on this couch. David looks perfect on it, settled and at home. He’d make a thousand compromises if it kept this man here, just like this.

“Why did you leave?”

Patrick flinches. “What?” he says, like he doesn’t know exactly what David’s asking.

It’s the question that lit up his phone that first night in Ray’s rented room, when he finally plugged it in to recharge. The notifications poured in—voicemails from Rachel and texts from his mom and an audio recording from his dad that must have been sent by mistake, because there was no way he knew how to do that on purpose. He’d used their light to find his way to the bed in the dark. Even after they faded, untouched, he still didn’t sleep.

Some version of this question had kept his phone buzzing steadily for the next several weeks. At first he avoided giving an answer because he didn’t know. Then he avoided giving an answer because he knew but didn’t want to say. He only stopped avoiding when his phone stopped asking.

No one else has ever asked, so he’s never had to answer.

“If you were happy in the life you built, why did you leave it behind?”

Never until tonight. _It didn’t feel like my business to ask,_ David said earlier, and Patrick needs, more than anything, for him to know that it’s all his business. So he has to answer.

“It left me behind,” Patrick says. “After I proposed to Rachel, my life started taking off in a way that I couldn’t keep pace with anymore. I couldn’t stay. I had no choice but to go.”

There’d been so much comfort in that, Patrick remembers, knowing he didn’t have a choice. Decisions had always been so easy for him to make. (Just don’t make mistakes!) He’d never known there was something easier.

“And thank God, obviously.” Patrick laughs a little into the space still between them and David matches him. That feels good. “If I look at it a certain way, I guess I did choose exactly the life I deserved. One that left me behind so I could meet you.”

David’s smile is not what one would call fully devoid of preening. “That’s a nice way of looking at it.”

“It is. But...”

“But?” The smile flickers into a grimace and then back. There’s such a fine line between those two expressions. As if, after their many years spent as one and the same, sometimes they still forget how to separate.

“But I can’t help seeing it another way, too. Is it okay if I tell one more story?”

”Mm-hm.” David nods and visibly strains to quiet his face, to make it a good listener. “Whatever you have to say. It’s all okay.”

***

Patrick figured out who Ken reminded him of.

There’d been a boy at his summer camp who smiled just like that, at all the girls. On the floating dock during free swim, the girls surrounded him in a squealing throng and he doled out that smile. Every now and then, he’d single one out and lift her easily in his arms before tossing her into the water. When she came up laughing, he’d reach out and reel her back in.

Every day for two weeks, Patrick had watched this play out from the shore. He remembered wishing he could be that confident, that smooth with girls. He’d been wishing something else, too, but he wouldn’t know it for a long time.

What was the boy’s name—Mark, Tim? It was funny which dots his memory connected and which it didn’t.

Ken had been giving him that same smile all night, was giving it to him right now as he glanced up from aiming his next shot. That smile that said, _If you want me to, I’ll throw you right off the edge of this thing._

They were playing pool and drinking beer at the Wobbly Elm. David had insisted he make it a proper date, so Patrick said they were going to dinner, but there was nowhere to eat for miles around that he hadn’t taken David on a date, and that wasn’t happening. It wouldn’t be fair. To whom he wasn’t sure, but it was probably safest to assume to everyone.

Besides, this did feel like a proper date to Patrick. Shooting pool in the basement of the student center had been his go-to when asking girls out in college. He’d always let them win, but there was no “letting” with Ken. He was getting his ass kicked quite legitimately.

After a pair of efficient clacks, the eight ball landed in the corner pocket. 

“Best two out of three?” Ken asked, coming around to retrieve his beer from Patrick’s hand. They’d both laughed at the odd tone of the “No fucking drinks please :)” labels printed and taped atop each edge of the pool table, but obeyed them anyway, taking turns holding the two bottles while the other shot.

“I think we both know how that’s gonna end,” Patrick said, taking a swig of his drink.

If the pool felt mostly familiar, the beer was proving trickier to navigate. Patrick had been on enough gay dates by now to know that there was no way to drink from a beer bottle non-seductively. He just didn’t trust this place to have clean glassware. Maybe he should have ordered a bottle of Jampagne and a straw. He’d seen it done before.

“I can go easy on you, if you want.” That smile again. _If you want, if you want, if you want._

Ken took another step toward him, and Patrick had officially never been this close to another man next to a pool table. If he’d asked out Emmet Holbrook in college instead of his twin sister Emily, would it have gone like this? Would Emmet have stepped close to him, cradled both their cues in one elbow, put his hand on Patrick’s waist…?

The touch jolted him into a sudden realization of what he was doing, thinking about floating docks and student center basements and Emmet Holbrook. He was trying to write Ken into his past because he didn’t belong in his present. Only David belonged there. Here. Right now.

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Patrick said as he abandoned his beer on the table’s edge, right over that :) staring up at him in Comic Sans. The bottle slid down the nearly imperceptible angle of the surface and hit the floor with a wet smash. Hence the fucking insistence of the label.

Normally Patrick wouldn’t leave a mess like this. He’d stay and explain, stay and clean up. But he didn’t; he left. The floor of the Wobbly Elm would survive, had seen much worse. And he could call Ken tomorrow to apologize. He had his number.

***

From the cumulative effect of David’s series of faces, Patrick can tell he has his own future dinner party story here. “Well, have I ever told you about the time David tried to marry me off to a man with incomprehensible shoes?” he’ll say, and then it will be his turn to be kicked under the table. _This is all okay, too,_ they’ll say in that silent way.

For now, though, his partner still needs slightly more audible reassurance.

“I meant what I told you that night,” Patrick says. “I have no interest in making up for lost time. But. I think it’s... important for me to recognize that I lost it.”

David’s eyebrows broadcast the exact moment when he stops thinking about his own feelings and reorients to Patrick’s. “You hate losing,” he says.

It’s remarkable, really, how much the things Patrick already knows about himself sound even more like the truth when David says them.

“Yeah, not if I can help it,” Patrick agrees. “But there’s really no way to help it. I look back on my life and I just find these... endless Choose Your Own Adventure moments where if I turn to page 80 I get to know I’m gay right then, and if I turn to page 7 I get–” he gestures at David, at the couch, at his own chest “–all this. Eventually. And I wouldn’t choose differently, but I resent having to choose at all. I shouldn’t have had to choose between feeling like a whole person all along and ending up in this life that I love. I want both. Most people get to have both.”

David’s crying, and he’s not even trying to tilt his head back to hide it. He almost doesn’t catch himself before wiping tears on his sleeve, which is possibly the most shocking display of emotion Patrick can imagine. (“No bodily fluids on my knits,” David had said the first time they ever fully undressed each other, explaining the careful distance he put between his clothes and the bed. It’s a very firm rule.) 

Patrick moves to reach for him, but he’s waved off. 

“For the record,” David says after a minute, dabbing under his eyes with the backs of his thumbs. “I was very much not a whole person before you met me. But I know what you mean. That part of me was always whole.” He takes a deep breath, rearranges his game face. “Anyway, I’m fine. Keep going.”

Patrick grasps after the thought that had just skirted away around some corner while he was focused on David’s tears. It takes some effort to pull it back. “I guess I’m... just now realizing there’s a difference between processing that I’m gay, and processing that I’ve always been gay. I did the first thing, and it was wonderful. It felt…”

But sleep is licking at his brain like a mothering cat, and he can’t find the words to describe what felt so wonderful about going to buy a single picture frame and ending up with twenty options in his cart; or pacing his room at 5 AM, terrified he’d spent his first real kiss tasting like mozzarella sticks; or getting naked next to someone he really _wanted_ , finally, to touch and having no idea where to put his hands; or...

David swings his feet down to the floor and leans across to interlace their fingers. He uses the leverage to tug himself across the couch and tug Patrick back from his spun-out thoughts.

“I know,” he says. “I was there.”

Right. Patrick has a past with David to look back on now, too, and it’s only growing. They can look back on it together. He’ll never have to explain it.

Patrick had been about to say something else, he’s sure of it. But now David’s close, and holding his hand, and smelling that way he does. Patrick loops his free arm around David’s waist and tackles them both back onto the couch, pressing his face into his boyfriend’s sweatered shoulder and inhaling deeply. He feels David’s palm press down the length of his spine. It’s a passionate embrace—physical but not sexual. 

Early on with David, Patrick expressed himself through sex practically every chance he got. He’d had so much to say. It was like, after years of failing French, he discovered he could write poetry in Chinese and churned out page after page. By now he’s discovered so many different ways to express himself. It had taken all of his concentration—with Rachel, with Emily Holbrook, with the rest of his handful of girls—to chase that one specific kind of passion he’d always been told he deserved. He’d never thought about any other kinds. David thinks about all the kinds, always. He’s passionate about everything.

David’s shown him how to dream up a passionate life, and he’s shown David how to choose it.

“Come on,” David rumbles from beneath him, around him, “let’s go to bed.”

Patrick nods, but doesn’t otherwise move. Bed sounds good. But also. He’d just been thinking something? Just landed on some final draft of an important idea he’s been having. And it’s gone already. But there’s something here still. Something changing. Right now. He doesn’t want to miss it.

“One more minute,” Patrick mutters, and takes it. They spend the minute together.

**Author's Note:**

> I got into this fic-writing game thinking it was just for myself, that kudos and comments were beside the point. But then y’all kept showering me with such lovely kindness and now I’m reduced to begging: If you have thoughts or feelings about this, please let me know! I love reading it all.


End file.
